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GraalVM based Apache Kafka Image is an experimental docker image for local development and testing usage. GraalVM Native-Image tool is still in maturing stage, hence the usage of this image for production can’t be recommended.
Testing of the Docker Image: Sanity Tests for the P0 functionalities like Image coming up, topics creation, producing, consuming, restart etc will be added. We will also try to run the existing system tests on the built Apache Kafka native executable.

Build, Test and Scanning Pipeline

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We intend to setup a nightly cron job using GitHub Actions and leverage an open-source vulnerability scanning tool like trivy (https://github.com/aquasecurity/trivy), to get vulnerability reports on all supported images. This tool offers a straightforward way to integrate vulnerability checks directly into our GitHub Actions workflow. 

Release Process

Following is the plan to release the Docker image:

1. RM would have generated and pushed Apache Kafka's Release Candidate artifacts to apache sftp server hosted in Image Modifiedhome.apache.org by release.py script
2. Run the automation to build the docker image(using the above Release Candidate tarball URL) and test the image.

3. The docker image needs to be pushed to some Dockerhub repo(eg. Release Manager's) for the evaluation of RC Docker image.

4. Start the Voting for RC, which will include the Docker image as well as docker sanity tests report.

5. In case any docker image specific issue is detected, that will be evaluated by the community, if it’s a release blocker or not.

6. Once the vote passes, the image will be pushed to apache/kafka-native with the version as tag.

7. Steps for the Docker image release will be included in the Release Process doc of Apache Kafka

8. eg. for AK release 3.7.0 and image released will be apache/kafka-native:3.7.0 (=> image contains AK 3.7.0)

Ownership of the Docker Images' Release

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